‘As Many People with the Ships as can be Gotten’: Revisiting Enslavement and the Slave Trade on the Coromandel Coast

Abstract

This article revisits the Dutch East India Company slave trading networks in the Bay of Bengal in the seventeenth century. It relies on the extensive but understudied archives of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) to provide new insights on local structures of enslavement as well as the patterns of slave trade across the Indian Ocean World. From these sources, it becomes clear that the VOC was both directly and indirectly complicit in the organization of explicitly violent slave trade networks in Arakan, Bengal, and the Coromandel Coast, which challenges the dominant historiographical narrative of ‘famine-slave cycles’ as structuring enslavement in this region. Advancing instead an analysis of enslavement in the Bay of Bengal in terms of the different slavery regimes that historically coexisted in this maritime region, this article provides a more nuanced account of the interactions between export and import regions, local bondage systems, and warfare and raiding regimes.